With the upcoming presidential election in the arguably world’s richest and most powerful democracy as well as in my wealthy but minuscule country of birth, I consider it timely to post these lines, which I found during my Kunming time in the early 2000s in a short book written by New York poet Witter Bynner during WWII and published in 1944. I believe that both the shameful display of the panem et circenses state of modern democracy during the US and Austrian presidential campaigns, which I described in an essay earlier this year, as well as the loss of direction of the individuals subject to these democratic organizations is well captured in the foreword to his translation of the Tao Te Ching. Despite this saddening state of contemporary democracy and the henceforth implicit crisis of modern man, I see in his words a bright sliver lining for both democracy and man.

Herrymon Maurer in a postscript of The Old Fellow, his fictional portrait of Laotzu, notes how closely the use of life according to Laotzu relates to the principles of democracy. Maurer is right that democracy cannot be a successful general practice unless it is first a true individual conviction. Many of us in the West think ourselves believers in democracy if we can point to one of its fading flowers even while the root of it in our own lives is gone with worms. No one in history has shown better than Laotzu how to keep the root of democracy clean. Not only democracy but all of life, he points out, grows at one’s own doorstep. Maurer says, “Laotzu is one of our chief weapons against tanks, artillery and bombs.”

Laotzu knew that organizations and institutions interfere with a man’s responsibility to himself and therefore with his proper use of life, that the more any outside interference with a man’s use of life and the less the man uses it according to his own instinct and conscience, the worse for the man and the worse for society.

The only authority is “the way of life” itself; a man’s sense of it is the only priest or prophet. And yet, as travelers have seen Taoism in China, it is a cult compounded of devils and derelicts, a priest-ridden clutter of superstitions founded on ignorance and fear. As an organized religion, its initial and main sect having been established in the fist century A.D. by a Pope named Chang Taolin, Taoism has even less to do with its founder than most cults have to do with the founders from whom they profess derivation. Even in modern China a Taoist papacy is paid to exorcize demons out of rich homes … Thus man love to turn the simplest and most human of their species into complex and superhuman beings; thus everywhere men yearn to be misled by magicians [read politicians]; thus priests and cults in all lands and under virtuous guise make of ethics a craft and a business.

Confucius had the wisdom to forbid that a religion be based on this personality or codes; and his injunction against graven images has fared better than similar injunction in the Ten Commandments. Hence Confucius continues unchanged as a realistic philosopher, an early pragmatist, while Laotzu and Jesus, his ethical fellows, have been tampered with by prelates, have been more and more removed from human living and relegated as mystics to a supernatural world.

Confucius prescribed formalized rather than spontaneous conduct for the development of superior men in their relation not only to the structure of society but to themselves. Laotzu, with little liking for organized thought or recruited action, no final faith in any authority but the authority of the heart, suggests that if those in charge of human affairs would act on instinct and conscience there would be less and less need of organized authority for governing people or, at any rate – and here he is seen as the realist he remains, as a man aware of necessarily gradual steps – less need for “superior men” to show. In our own time we have had evidence of the tragic effects of showy authority [Bynner referring to A. Hitler, J. Stalin and the likes of his own time].

What is original? A review of a TED radiohour and some implications on how the Western world should change its perspective on the “Chinese technology threat”: give up your technology and trust in the invisible hand. During the last decade I have been involved with technology transfer and intellectual property issues related to China. I have come to recognize some basic patterns in this field, which are nothing new but are somehow my main take away from working in the technology law industry in an emerging market: - Since the mid 80ies China has opened up its economy and in the course of the following 20 years it has established a well drafted intellectual property framework based on international laws promulgated by bodies like WTO or WIPO and modeled after foreign innovation system like Singapore or Germany. - This national legal framework – in spite of poor execution measures - was sold to the Western world as China’s acceptance of international law and was one of the entrance tickets to the Western dominated world economy. - In the tradition of the Chinese proverb 指鹿为马 [pointing at a deer and calling it a horse] China reiterated for years that it had fulfilled all requirements and obligations but actually undermined the IPR framework by industrial policies which force foreign investments to gradually give up technology and know how. James McGregor described these policies in an APCO paper “China’s Drive for Indigenous Innovation”. The German author Frank Sieren calls one of the main elements of these industrial policies pointedly “Concubine Economy”. - This reality caused foreign businesses to develop their own protection strategies, which try to circumvent a seemingly not navigable system, i.e. protecting know how without resorting to the legal system. A Swiss research team on technology management analyzed these measures in a paper titled “How Managers Protect IPRs Using de facto Strategies”. - I have the impression that such de facto strategies can delay know how loss, but in the long run a technocrat government will succeed in absorbing what it wants; and more importantly it is the peculiar economic development stage at which China finds itself that creates know how spill over and thus intense domestic innovation. - I moreover believe that all the obstacles that humanity faces can only be resolved if East and West collaborate. That’s not a call for world peace, but a pretty rationalistic understanding of which problems we face and what it takes to resolve them – just think of environmental pollution on a global scale. It might as well be that some required inventions for humanities progress are only triggered by great turmoil, disastrous warfare and close to end of the world scenarios. In other words: all is good, even though it might look dim and dark, because there is an invisible hand guiding all of us, all that is. - Retiring from metaphysical and religious deliberations and resorting to mundane explanations, I would like to summarize a National Public Radio podcast called “TED Radiohour” which aired a program at the end of June under the title “What is Original?” DJ and producer Mark Ronson: “You know, in music, we take something that we love, and we build on it. That’s just how it goes. Pablo Picasso is quoted: Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” T.S. Elliot built on this quotation: One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. Ronson continues: “Subconsciously we are influenced whether we like it our not.” Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson claims that only the big bang is original, everything else is derivative. He describes Bob Dylan as a folk musician whose music was 2/3 copied from others, but acknowledges that in what he did, he followed the routine of all artists of that genre: folk musicians contributed to the body of folk music. He dismantles George Lucas Star Wars movies as a copy of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and shows with the iphone that American copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on a common body by considering creations a private property although the common body of inventions is a public good. Where is the line between copying and building something new? Steve Jobs showed that it’s more a question of perspective that anything else: in 1996 he quotes Picasso and confirms that Apple has always been shameless about stealing from others. In 2010, when Google’s Android mobile phone is launched, he says “great artist steal, but not from me”. Ferguson suggests to be transparent in using contents from others – what people want is credit for their contribution to the common body of inventions. I think that’s a reasonable approach. Johanna Blakely tells us that the fashion genius is really in curating from the past and reviving it in the present; and since copyright law barely touches fashion, the industry benefits in innovation and sales. Why not extend this best practice to other industries? Earlier this year, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk decided to give away his company's patents for free. It might seem like a strange business move, but Musk said he wanted to inspire creativity and accelerate innovation. Writer Steven Johnson says this is the way great ideas have been born throughout history. Therefore it’s maybe time to rethink how we try to control our know-how. SO why continue to spend a fortune on patent registration, IPR maintenance and enforcement, in particular in China, where as we have read earlier, it’s all in vain? Ideas and innovation thrive in environments where ideas are free to flow from mind to mind and to be reused and repurposed and remixed in interesting and surprising ways. And a lot of the technology we're dependent on has come out of that kind of collaborative network. Johnson continues to explain that these collaborative networks and a change in diet [from alcohol to coffee] were the reason for many inventions made during the age of enlightenment. Visionary people would come together in coffeehouses in Boston, Philadelphia, London, Paris and Vienna to discuss visionary ideas. I ask myself where these places happen to be nowadays. Where do visionary people meet to discuss visionary ideas? Silicon Valley or Shanghai Zhangjiang Hitech Park? Steven Johnson wrote a book about “What is the space of creativity?” but I am not sure if he only wrote about traditional Western spaces or new Chinese realms of creativity. I see innovation not only happening in China because companies absorb foreign technology and the central government coerces hitech enterprises to jump into JV with SOEs. I see bursts of innovation because technicians, engineers and executives from all continents and industry backgrounds meet on a regular basis in technology parks like in Shanghai’s Pudong district Zhangjiang Gaoke. They might not meet in fin de siècle Viennese coffee houses, but they equally exchange ideas and spill over know how. I see intense innovation happen, because Chinese entrepreneurs who have spent a few years abroad return to China with ideas which they adapt and improve. I see innovation happen, because humanity faces in densely populated regions like Eastern China new challenges, which do not exist anywhere else. Think of mass transportation within urban centers and between them. Think of food provision for million of people, but a scarcity of arable land. I have seen pork farms and green houses in Yunnan entirely shaded with photovoltaic roofs to use land twice: for agriculture and power generation. And there is one thing I couldn’t agree more with Johnson: diet. Chinese are more innovative than they have been 10 years ago, because they slowly turn into a coffee drinking society. Starbucks already calls China it’s second home market. Western innovation reports tend to emphasize the importance of formal basic research & development, but usually undervalue incremental research and development. Comparing European and Chinese businesses over the last years, I have the impression that the West sometimes innovates for the sake of innovation whereas China builds on top of existing inventions to commercialize. Even the cold war created great inventions: Steven Johnson tells us that the launch of the first Soviet satellite caused the US to develop the global positioning system GPS. Insofar, even war and the build up of arms can do some good for humanity in the long run. Trust in the invisible hand and to throw in some Eastern philosophy, some Taoist thought and some Buddhist concepts: trust that all knowledge that is has only one source and worldly barriers and differences are nothing but avidya: a delusion. Abandon (intellectual) property law because it is the vehicle for division between yours and mine. In reality nothing belongs to us, but everything to all that is. The Tibetan Buddhist master Ringu Tulku explains the nature of avidya (ignorance) as follows: In the Buddhist sense, ignorance is equivalent to the identification of a self as being separate from everything else. It consists of the belief that there is an "I" that is not part of anything else. On this basis we think, "I am one and unique. Everything else is not me. It is something different."... From this identification stems the dualistic view, since once there is an "I," there are also "others." Up to here is "me." The rest is "they." As soon as this split is made, it creates two opposite ways of reaction: "This is nice, I want it!" and "This is not nice, I do not want it!"